Despite all the new technologies and marketing channels at our fingertips one technique remains the most effective for generating leads in a cost effective and efficient manner. That technique is email marketing.
To fully take advantage of email marketings potential, marketers must build a list of prospects who are interested in your product or service and then nurture those relationships by sending high quality communications that provide value to your audience.
What Is Email Lead Generation
Lead generation through email marketing first starts with an opt-in form on your website or social media, this form is used to gather customers information such as names and email addresses.
Email marketing is not only used for lead generation but also for nurturing leads and eventually converting them into paying customers.
Why You Can’t Buy Email Leads
It may be tempting to buy an email list in order to fast track the process, gather information quicker and get the ball rolling however we would strongly advise against this.
Buying an email list is one of the most damaging decisions you can make for your business and here is why:
- The new GDPR legislation states that if you send emails to a purchased list you can get your email address permanently blocked.
- The people on that list have no idea who you or your business is, so the chances of them opting out and leaving you with an empty list you have paid for is high.
- Since they never opted in and gave you permission to contact them, they will likely report your communications as spam, ruining your deliverability rate and reputation.
- The chances of you making any sales from a purchased list of random emails is incredibly low
Importance Of A Lead Generation Strategy
If you want to boost your sales using email marketing you need to utilise a lead generation strategy in order to engage with potential customers and increase conversions.
Creating an effective lead generation strategy will benefit your business by:
- Allowing you to connect with your target audience
- Boosting your brand awareness
- Generating more leads
- More leads generally means more sales
Best Practices
1. Utilise Lead Scoring: Put simply, lead scoring is a technique that helps you sort, organise and prioritise your leads by ranking them from least to most likely to convert. For example if a customer has viewed a certain product or clicked a certain link, it would suggest they are more likely to make a purchase, therefore you may be inclined to offer them a discount via email in order to get them to convert.
2. Clean And Concise Emails: Sending clear and concise emails is crucial in converting potential customers. Emails cluttered with too many pictures, graphics and videos are not only visually unappealing but they also take longer to load and put more pressure on people’s data and devices.
Marketing emails need to be clean, concise and to the point otherwise the look of the email takes away from the actual message of the email.
3. Attention Grabbing Subject Lines: Writing an attention grabbing subject line is no easy task and is often an afterthought when creating marketing emails. It’s important to get creative with ways to inspire curiosity or urgency to click. Utilise elements such as bold, italic font, and emojis to capture the attention of your audience and draw their gaze to the most important part of your email – the subject line.
4. Include Strong Call-to-action (CTA): It is important to be clear in your communications and what you are looking for from your customers, otherwise you are just cluttering up their inbox and a call to action is the perfect way to do this.
All your emails have a purpose, so decide what that is and what you want the participant to do. Buttons, pictures and links can all be utilised as CTA’s in order to get the user to complete the desired action in the fewest clicks possible.
It is possible to overdo it with Call To Actions, use them sparingly so as to not confuse your audience by telling them to do lots of different actions.
5. Leverage Your Social Media Channels in Unison: Promoting your email list on your social media is a great way to grow your list. You should also promote your social media via your email list in order to organically grow them both in unison. Adding sign up buttons on your Facebook, Instagram and Twitter gives your audience further opportunities to subscribe to your email list.
6. Provide Value Content: Improving the content of your email marketing and providing real value in your communications is no easy task. But successfully doing so will reduce the amount of your contacts who become inactive.
Writing engaging informative communications takes time and research as you should be looking to provide value to your customers at every possible opportunity. Providing useful, objective information that addresses common issues and pains your customers are likely to experience is a good starting point and once you get comfortable with this type of information that fits your company’s brand values, you will start to find it easy to supplement this info with sales messages that will be well received.
7. Incentivise Referrals From Existing Subscribers: One of the best ways to generate leads for your business is to put your existing customers and subscribers to work for you. By offering rewards and offers to your subscribers in exchange for them referring their friends to your email list is a lot simpler than getting them to refer their friends to purchase a product.
Your conversion rate will most likely increase if you offer attractive and relevant rewards in exchange for referrals. Make sure that the reward is actually worth their while.
Wrap Up
Using these techniques you will be able to generate more leads for your company and increase your sales. If you would rather leave it to the professionals then feel free to contact Inboxx. Allow us to unlock your company’s full potential. Inboxx provide direct email marketing services for B2B businesses designed to get you noticed by the people that matter, boost your leads and increase your revenue.
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